FM newsroom – sustainability, office. In a typical office building thousands of feet of vents and fans push around the air. And while many in the offices spend the summer fighting over the control over the air conditioning, a new mixed-use building in Oslo doesn’t have any fans to fuss about, just as it doesn’t have any HVAC bills either.
The mixed-use building of Vertikal Nydalen sits by the river in Oslo in a former parking lot in an area that’s transitioning to become a car-free zone. Next to it, there’s a new public plaza. The building designed by Snøhetta is positioned to help block the wind while letting sunlight into the plaza. It’s also carefully designed to maximize natural ventilation. The shape of Snøhetta’s „triple-zero” building helps air flow naturally.
“We have a triple zero goal for this project: we wouldn’t have to buy any energy for heating, ventilation, or cooling. And it looks like the numbers are going our way on that one so far, and it’s working.” – Anne Cecilie Haug, the lead architect on the project for Snøhetta, told FastCompany.
Heating works by warming up people
Sensors monitor the temperature, CO2, and oxygen levels inside the office building, as well as the weather and the direction of the wind outside. When an office needs fresh air, hatches automatically open on opposite sides of the building, creating a pressure difference that pulls outside air through the space. The system would work in a regular rectangular building, too, but the building’s angled façade helps optimize the airflow.
Instead of a furnace and air conditioning, the building is heated and cooled with geothermal energy. Then warm or cool water moves through pipes built into concrete floors and clay walls. Heat radiates from the materials, warming up people directly. That’s important because a traditional forced air system, which inefficiently heats the air, would lose energy to the outdoors every time the hatches open.
In a typical office, as many as 60% of workers might say that they’re too hot or too cold. IIn feedback via QR codes by each desk, less than 7% of the workers in the new building complained about temperature, perhaps because the radiant heating system heats evenly throughout a room; it doesn’t matter if you’re next to a vent, because there are no vents.
Regulations can’t keep pace with innovation
Avoiding traditional ventilation means that the building avoids the carbon footprint of the equipment along with the energy use. The emissions of the building are half that of a similar conventional building. But it also has other benefits, like the fact that the offices feel airier and more spacious without ductwork in the ceilings.
The building has restaurants at the street level, five floors of offices, and apartments on the top 10 floors. While the apartments have a more traditional ventilation system with openable windows, the offices couldn’t use simple windows due to the unique airflow system. However, as regulations also require strict temperature and air quality control in office spaces, the new building had to be granted an exception not to use traditional ventilation.
The project is part of a Norwegian research program called FutureBuilt.
“I think what people are doing in research is three, four, five years ahead of regulations. So we need to have them to come up to speed, and the only way to do that is to challenge it,”- Anne Cecilie Haug pointed out.
Images: snohetta.com
